I Can’t Breathe A Killing on Bay Street BY MATT TAIBBI (Spiegel & Grau)

This gut-wrenching account of the death and life of Eric Garner is a deep dive into every aspect of the case, including its legal impact, which is minimal, and its cultural and political ones, which have been profound. Most revealing are the stories Taibbi tells about other African Americans, mostly male and poor, who were stopped and frisked, strip-searched, sexually assaulted, set up, beaten or killed for the tragic reason that racist cops didn’t like them or the even more tragic one that those kinds of humiliations are ordained by U.S. law and policy. The stories relate to one another and to the Garner case, which gives “I Can’t Breathe” the feel of a police procedural. The narrative unfolds like an episode of “The Wire” but without the comic relief — or the show’s grudging empathy for the cops. Some readers might object to Taibbi’s tone of sustained outrage. But the author is mad as hell at the police and the politics that empower their brutality.